5 Factors Affecting Your Search Ranking

Not being specific enough with keywords

The biggest mistake people make with keyword selection is to not be specific enough. Years ago, a client who sold electrical goods wanted to rank number one for the word ‘videos’ because the client thought it would drive thousands of visitors to buy their video recorders and DVD players. Yet in reality, most searches for videos are looking for the actual media itself, not a player. Moreover, the internet being what it is, a lot of searches for video-related content are not looking to buy anything at all, but rather to find free online video content. The majority of visitors’ first experience of the site would be one of great disappointment. Weeks after they have forgotten just what they were searching for, or precisely how your site failed to deliver what they wanted, they’ll still recognise the site with “Oh, I remember this site, it was rubbish and didn’t have what I want”.

Search engines don’t fill in forms

Search engines generally balk at filling in forms, and rightly so. The last thing Google wants is for their crawler, Googlebot, to be off filling in huge orders in shopping carts by accident. That would be annoying for all parties.

If you use any form elements for important content, such as drop-down menus for navigation, or search forms, then these are not search friendly. You’ll need alternate navigation to give the search engines access to those links so it can crawl further.  CSS styled drop-downs that are actually lists work very well.

Search engines don’t support JavaScript

Search engine crawlers are a user-agent that does not support JavaScript. If you use JavaScript for links without a more accessible fail-safe, then those links are quite possibly completely invisible to any search crawler.

Use fail-safe scripting, so that plain old HTML link alternatives are available to those people, as well as spiders, who don’t support JavaScript.

<a href=”alternative.htm” onClick=”location.href=’javascript-dependant.htm’;return false;”>

Using return false in your onClick scripting tells the browser that you are handling the click with JavaScript, and thus the browser ignores the click event. If JavaScript is disabled or not supported, the onClick event isn’t read, and the browser will react to the click by going to the href attribute as normal.

For any user-agent that doesn’t support JavaScript, including search crawlers, any embedded JavaScript in the page is just bloating the data without adding anything relevant. Try to make all JavaScript usage into external .JS files to keep the code lean, and make the site much faster for any user-agents that don’t support JavaScript. This will save you data transfer and reduce hosting costs too.

Avoid client-side session ID dependence

Session IDs in URLs are the absolute kiss-of-death to search engine accessibility.  From the crawler’s perspective, these URLs represent a bottomless pit of infinite URLs all leading to the exact same content.

Spiders don’t support cookies either; but you really don’t need to be keeping tabs on the session of a spider anyway. It isn’t going to use your shopping cart, remember.  Ensure your designs are not dependant on serving Session ID variables through cookies or URLs, or you’ll be keeping spiders out, and preventing the search index including your content.

Complex dynamic URLs are unsafe

Just as with forms, complex dynamic URLs with lots of data in the query string represent dangerous territory for the search spider. In fact, from the SEO perspective, it is best to avoid query strings altogether.

Use Apache’s mod_rewrite, or for windows machines, patch IIS with ISAPI-rewrite, so that you can dynamically rewrite URLs into a structure which seems more static, logical and meaningful. Not only will you get better coverage in search, you’ll also have massively improved site usability for people; with a URL structure that is easier to email, post in forums, and understand.

By

Adam Stafford

Founder

Fresh Egg